Haiti's rice farmers are dismayed. It's nearly harvest time in this fertile valley where the bulk of Haiti's food is grown, and they're competing once again with cheap U.S. imported rice.

Just down the road, vendors are undercutting them, selling the far less expensive grain. Subsidized U.S. rice has flooded Haiti for decades. Now, after the Jan. 12 quake, 15,000 metric tons of donated U.S. rice have arrived.

"I can't make any money off my rice with all the foreign rice there is now," said Renan Reynold, a 37-year-old farmer who makes an average of about $600 a year. "If I can't make any money, I can't feed my family."

Last month's catastrophic earthquake that killed an estimated 200,000 people and spurred emergency food needs for more than 4 million has raised a familiar predicament for aid organizations — how to help without undermining Haiti's fragile economy.

This nation born nearly 200 years out of a slave revolt hasn't been able to feed itself for more than two decades and now imports most of its food.

Since the quake, aid groups have spearheaded cash-for-work programs, some of which intend to help struggling farmers pay for seed. They're also helping with irrigation and crop diversification projects and working with Haiti's government to analyze soil.

But little is being done to change endemic problems, according to Jean Andre Victor, a Haitian agronomist. He is among analysts who believe Haiti needs radical agricultural reforms — not constant food aid.

"There's a long history in Haiti of groups like USAID flooding the market with rice and other imports," said Victor. "This is not what we need. We need real help and that means completely changing the agricultural system."

Agricultural production accounted for nearly half of gross domestic product in the 1970s. It now amounts to less than a third.

And U.S. rice imports have long eclipsed Haitian production, due in part to smaller local yields because of environmental degradation and the lowest rice import tariffs in the Caribbean community.

The earthquake has only exacerbated needs in farming provinces. The government says more than a half-million people have fled the capital for provinces, which lack the infrastructure and food to sustain such a population surge. The coming rains will only make things worse.

When the earthquake hit, Haiti was recovering from about $1 billion in crop damage from 2008 tropical storms. Now, farmers lack cash to buy seeds for the planting season that begins in two weeks, and food prices have already risen 10 percent since the quake.

Aid organizations say families caring for displaced people are spending their savings to feed new arrivals and consuming food stocks.

"Rural areas experiencing the highest levels of displacement from Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas are the most affected," said Dick Trenchard, Assessments Coordinator for the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in Haiti.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been working in Haiti for decades, is providing more than $400 million in earthquake aid with U.S. taxpayers set to give some $113 million in food aid alone this year.

But U.S. farmers also stand to benefit from the earthquake.

Last year, Washington paid farmers some $12.9 billion in subsidies, which critics say have unfairly deflated international prices. That makes it harder for poorer nations to develop their economies by expanding markets abroad.

Paul O'Brien of Oxfam America says the lessons of the harm of flooding a country like Haiti with subsidized rice should have been learned a long time ago.

"The days are gone when we can throw up our hands in terms of unintended consequences; we know now what these injections can do to markets," he said. "The question we want asked is what is being done to guarantee long-term food security for Haitians."

Haiti's 2008 food price riots prompted President Rene Preval to announce subsidies that would lower the price of rice. And still, there is plenty of malnutrition.

Some 2.4 million Haitians — out of a population of nearly 10 million — cannot afford the minimum daily calories recommended by the World Health Organization.

With planting season just weeks away for crops including beans and spinach, the Haitian government is looking at ways to boost agricultural production.

But donors often sink more money into emergency aid than such long-term projects.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has warned only 8 percent of a $23 million appeal to help Haiti revive food production has been funded.

James Woolley, a senior agronomist working with USAID in Haiti, said the multiple challenges that must be addressed in order to boost production include the country's small farming plots and persistent litany of natural disasters.

One way of attacking the problem of getting Haiti to be able to feed itself again is to focus on diet.

Before the 1970s, Haitians only ate rice once or twice a week, getting starch from other local staples like sorghum and manioc, Woolley said.

Today, rice is a staple but often U.S.-subsidized rice costs less than locally grown crops. On Friday, a 25-kilogram (55-pound) bag of US rice cost about $36, compared with $60 for the same size sack of Haitian rice.

USAID said it is investigating reports that bags of donated rice are being sold on the market and studying whether its policies in Haiti are having adverse effects on local markets.

"USAID conducts regular analyses in Haiti and across the world to make sure that our food aid does not serve as a disincentive to local production," Moira Whelan, a spokeswoman for USAID in Washington, D.C., said in an interview Thursday.

Whelan would not respond, however, when asked what the analyses had determined in Haiti.

U.S. intervention in Haitian agricultural policy is not without precedent.

In the 1970s, fearing indigenous pigs could spread swine fever, the United States — in conjunction with USAID — moved to replace all of Haiti's hearty Creole pigs with pigs from Iowa. The end result was the fragile U.S. pigs often became sick, preferred expensive feed and had fewer litters.

Reynold, meanwhile, stands hunched over the small rice paddy he rents from a property owner and hopes opportunity will come out of Haiti's latest crisis.

He needs cheap credit, cheaper fertilizer and more government aid, he said.

"Each year, it gets harder to survive."

Less than a penny of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government, according to an Associated Press review of relief efforts.

Two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has nearly quadrupled to $379 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Wednesday. That's about $1.25 each from everyone in the United States.

Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just less than one cent to the Haitian government, and about half a cent to the Dominican Republic.

The U.S. government money is part of close to $2 billion in relief aid flowing into Haiti — almost all of it managed by organizations other than the Haitian government, which has been struggling to re-establish its authority since the quake. On Wednesday, a defensive President Rene Preval acknowledged his country's reputation for graft, but said aid money isn't lining the pockets of government officials.

"There's a perception of corruption, but I would like to tell the Haitian people that the Haitian government has not seen one penny of all the money that has been raised — millions are being made on the right, millions on the left, it's all going to the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)" Preval said, speaking in Creole at a news conference.

Relief experts say it would be a mistake to send too much direct cash to the Haitian government, which was already unstable before the quake and routinely included on lists of the world's most corrupt countries.

"I really believe Americans are the most generous people who ever lived, but they want accountability," said Timothy R. Knight, a former US AID assistant director who spent 25 years distributing disaster aid. "In this situation they're being very deliberate not to just throw money at the situation but to analyze based on a clear assessment and make sure that money goes to the best place possible."

The AP review of federal budget spreadsheets, procurement reports and contract databases shows the vast majority of U.S. funds going to established and tested providers including the U.N. World Food Program, the Pan American Health Organization and nonprofit groups such as Save The Children, which have sent in everything from the $3.4 million barge that cleared the port for aid deliveries to pinto beans at 40 cents a pound.

"We are trying to respond as quickly as we can to this catastrophe of biblical proportions by mustering all of the resources that the United States government can bring to bear, first on rescue leading into relief, which is where we are right now, and hopefully seamlessly into recovery," said Lewis Lucke, U.S. special coordinator for relief and reconstruction.

Major relief efforts were launched within hours of the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed at least 150,000, devastated the capital of Port-au-Prince and affected a third of its 9 million people. Behind each effort has been cash and contracts, airline tickets to be purchased and ocean freighters to be leased.

Of each U.S. taxpayer dollar, 42 cents funds US AID's disaster assistance — everything from $5,000 generators to $35 hygiene kits with soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste for a family of five.

Another 33 cents is going to the U.S. military, paying for security, search and rescue teams, and the Navy's hospital ship USNS Comfort.

Just under a dime has already been spent on food: 122 million pounds of pinto beans, black beans, rice, corn soy blend and vegetable oil. When purchased in bulk, the actual food prices are relatively low. Pinto beans, for example, cost the U.S. government 40 cents a pound when purchased in 5 million-pound batches last week.

Getting the food to Haitians — paying for freighters, trucks and distribution centers, and the people to staff them, took another nine cents from each dollar.

Initial disaster spending was aimed at saving lives; now the spending is shifting to recovery. The Obama administration is putting five cents of each dollar into efforts to pay survivors to work. One program already in place describes paying 40,000 Haitians $3 per day for 20 days to clean up around hospitals and dig latrines. That project also includes renting 10 excavators and loaders, at $600 each, and 10 dump trucks at $50 a load.

Just under one penny of each dollar is going straight to the shattered Haitian government, whose president is sleeping in a tent while struggling to organize an administration that was notoriously unstable even before the earthquake.

The U.S. rarely gives large amounts of money directly to governments, a practice that is "very defensible from my point of view," said John Simon, who coordinated U.S. responses to international disasters under President Bush's administration.

A final half-cent funds three Dominican Republic hospitals near the Haitian border, where refugees have been begging for help.

The U.S. is providing the largest slice of a global response that totals more than $1 billion in government pledges. The European Union's 27 nations are contributing $575 million. The U.S. also has long been the largest donor of ongoing foreign aid that Haiti depends on for up to 40 percent of its budget, with more than $260 million in U.S. money last year aimed at promoting stability, prosperity and democracy.

The money is flowing through federal agencies that administer $2.6 billion already appropriated in the 2010 budget for foreign disaster relief, said Thomas Gavin, a spokesman at the White House Office of Management and Budget. He said there are no plans to ask Congress for more money.

Of the private disaster aid flowing into Haiti, U.S. charities have raised $470 million, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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Associated Press writer Yesica Fisch reported this story from Port-au-Prince and Martha Mendoza from Mexico City.

A frightening new aftershock Wednesday forced more earthquake survivors to live on the capital's streets or sent them fleeing to perhaps even worse conditions in the countryside.

A flotilla of rescue vessels, meanwhile, led by the U.S. hospital ship Comfort, converged on the capital. They are helping fill gaps in still lagging global efforts to bring water, food and medical help to hundreds of thousands of people who are surviving in makeshift tents or simply on blankets or plastic sheets under the tropical sun.

The strongest tremor since Haiti's cataclysmic Jan. 12 earthquake struck at 6:03 a.m., just before sunrise while many were still sleeping. From the teeming plaza near the collapsed presidential palace to a hillside tent city, the 5.9-magnitude aftershock lasted only seconds but panicked thousands of Haitians.

"Jesus!" they cried as rubble tumbled and dust rose anew from government buildings around the plaza. Parents gathered up children and ran.

Up in the hills, where U.S. troops were helping thousands of homeless, people bolted screaming from their tents. Jajoute Ricardo, 24, came running from his house, fearing its collapse.

"Nobody will go to their house now," he said, as he sought a tent of his own. "It is chaos, for real."

A slow vibration intensified into side-to-side shaking that lasted about eight seconds — compared to last week's far stronger initial quake that seemed to go on for 30 seconds.

Throngs again sought out small, ramshackle "tap-tap" buses to take them away from the city. On Port-au-Prince's beaches, more than 20,000 people looked for boats to carry them down the coast, the local Signal FM radio reported.

But the desperation may actually be deeper outside the capital, closer to last week's quake epicenter.

"We're waiting for food, for water, for anything," Emmanuel Doris-Cherie, 32, said in Leogane, 25 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of Port-au-Prince. Homeless in Leogane lived under sheets draped across tree branches, and the damaged hospital "lacks everything," Red Cross surgeon Hassan Nasreddine said.

Hundreds of Canadian soldiers and sailors were deploying to that town and to Jacmel on the south coast to support relief efforts, and the Haitian government sent a plane and an overland team to assess needs in Petit-Goave, a seaside town 10 miles (15 kilometers) farther west from Leogane that was the epicenter of Wednesday's aftershock.

The death toll was estimated at 200,000, according to Haitian government figures relayed by the European Commission, with 80,000 buried in mass graves. The commission raised its estimate of homeless to 2 million, from 1.5 million, and said 250,000 people needed urgent aid.

Many badly injured Haitians still awaited lifesaving surgery.

"It is like working in a war situation," said Rosa Crestani of Doctors Without Borders at the Choscal Hospital. "We don't have any morphine to manage pain for our patients."

The damaged hospitals and emergency medical centers set up in Port-au-Prince needed surgeons, fuel for generators, oxygen and countless other kinds of medical supplies, aid groups said.

Dr. Evan Lyon, of the U.S.-based Partners in Health, messaged from the central University Hospital that the facility was within 24 hours of running out of key supplies. Wednesday's aftershock was yet another blow: Surgical teams and patients were forced to evacuate temporarily.

Troops of the 82nd Airborne Division were providing security at the hospital. A helicopter landing pad was designated nearby for airlifting the most critical patients to the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort.

The great white ship, 894 feet (272 meters) long, with a medical staff of 550, was anchored in Port-au-Prince harbor and had taken aboard its first two surgical patients by helicopter late Tuesday even as it was steaming in.

It joined the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and other U.S. warships offshore, along with the French landing craft Francis Garnier, which carried a medical team, hundreds of tents and other aid.

The seaborne rescue fleet will soon be reinforced by the Spanish ship Castilla, with 50 doctors and 450 troops, and by three other U.S.-based Navy vessels diverted from a scheduled Middle East mission. Canadian warships were already in Haitian waters, and an Italian aircraft carrier, the Cavour, also will join the flotilla with medical teams and engineers.

U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said at U.N. headquarters in New York that it's believed that 3 million people are affected, with 2 million of those needing food for at least six months.

At the hillside tent camp, set up on a golf course where an 82nd Airborne unit has its base, the lines of hungry and thirsty stretched downhill and out of sight as paratroopers handed out bottled water and ready-to-eat meals as fast as helicopters brought them in.

In one sign of normality, women were seen carrying baskets of cauliflower, sweet potatoes and sugar cane into the city from farms in the hills. Some food and water was on sale in Port-au-Prince's markets, but prices had skyrocketed.

"We need money, man. I don't have enough to buy anything," said a newly homeless man who gave his name as Ricardo, who was seeking work, food and shelter.

Looking over the golf course scene, 82nd Airborne Capt. John Hartsock said, "This is the first time I've seen it this orderly."

President Rene Preval stressed the relative quiet prevailing over much of Port-au-Prince. People understand, he told French radio, "it is through calmness (and) an even more organized solidarity that we're going to get out of this."

Concerns still persisted that looting and violence that flared up in pockets in recent days could spread. The European Commission's report described the security situation as "deteriorating."

But U.S. troops — some 11,500 soldiers, Marines and sailors onshore and offshore as of Wednesday and expected to total 16,000 by the weekend — could be seen slowly ratcheting up control over parts of the city. The U.N. was adding 2,000 peacekeepers to the 7,000 already in Haiti, and 1,500 more police to the 2,100-member international force.

Other small signs of normalcy rippled over Port-au-Prince: Street vendors had found flowers to sell to those wishing to honor their dead. One or two money transfer agencies had reopened to receive wired money from Haitians abroad. Officials said banks would open later this week.

But Wednesday's aftershock, the stench of the lingering dead, and the tears and upstretched hands of helpless Haitians made clear that the country's tragedy will continue for months and years as this poor land counts and remembers its losses.

After the tremor's dust settled, street merchant Marie-Jose Decosse walked past the partly collapsed St. Francois de Salles Hospital in Carrefour Feuille, one of the worst-hit sections of town. She raised her arms to the sky, and spoke for millions.

"Lord have mercy, for we are sinners! Please have mercy on Haiti," she shouted.

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Associated Press writers contributing to this report included Alfred de Montesquiou, Tamara Lush, Kevin Maurer, Michelle Faul and Bill Gorman in Haiti; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations; Emma Vandore and Elaine Ganley in Paris, and Aoife White in Brussels.

African swine fever struck the eastern side of the Dominican Republic in 1978. It was not until 1982 that the United States – citing fears that the outbreak spread to American farms – demanded the slaughter of all Haitian pigs. Was it an American Agri-business conspiracy?

Poverty has forced at least 225,000 children in Haiti's cities into slavery as unpaid household servants, far more than previously thought, a report said Tuesday.

The Pan American Development Foundation's report also said some of those children — mostly young girls — suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship.

The report recommends Haiti's government and international donors focus efforts on educating the poor and expanding social services such as shelters for girls, who make up an estimated two-thirds of the child servant population.

Young servants are known as "restavek" — Haitian Creole for "stays with" — and their plight is both widely known and a source of great shame in the Caribbean nation that was founded by a slave revolt more than 200 years ago.

Researchers said the practice is so common that almost half of 257 children interviewed in the sprawling Port-au-Prince shantytown of Cite Soleil were household slaves.

Most are sent by parents who cannot afford to care for them to families just slightly better off. Researchers found 11 percent of families that have a restavek have sent their own children into domestic servitude elsewhere.

Despite growing attention to the problem, researchers said their sources were unaware of any prosecutions of cases involving trafficking children or using them as unpaid servants in this deeply poor nation of more than 9 million people.

Glenn Smucker, one of the report's authors and a cultural anthropologist known for extensive work on Haiti, said he believes the number of restavek children is increasing proportionally with the population of Port-au-Prince as more migrants flee rural poverty to live in the capital.

The researchers surveyed more than 1,400 random households in five Haitian urban areas in late 2007 and early 2008, with funding help from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The most widely used previous number for restaveks came from a 2002 UNICEF survey, which estimated there were 172,000.

The new report used a broader counting system to include children related to household owners but still living in servitude, such as nieces or cousins, and as well as "boarders" living temporarily with another family but are still forced to provide labor.

"Most people working with restavek children ... think that these numbers, both ours and UNICEF's, are actually underestimating the problem," said Herve Razafimbahini, the Pan American Development Foundation's program director in Haiti.

He called for Haitian officials to conduct a national survey to analyze the full scope of the problem, including in rural areas.

Officials with the Ministry of Social Affairs could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

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Associated Press writers Evens Sanon reported this story from Port-Au-Prince and Jonathan M. Katz reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

A look at the world's 10 most corrupt and 10 least corrupt countries according to the Corruption Perceptions Index report published Tuesday by watchdog Transparency International.

The world's ten most corrupt countries:

1. Somalia

2. Afghanistan

3. Myanmar

4. Sudan

5. Iraq

6. Chad

7. Uzbekistan

8. Turkmenistan

9. Iran

10. Haiti

The world's ten least corrupt countries:

1. New Zealand

2. Denmark

3. Singapore

4. Sweden

5. Switzerland

6. Finland

7. Netherlands

8. Australia

9. Canada

10. Iceland

An emergency decree that prohibited large street protests and limited other civil liberties following the return of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya will be repealed within 24 hours, the country's interim leader said Monday.

The decree, which resulted in dozens of arrests and the closing of two pro-Zelaya media outlets, is no longer necessary because "we have peace in the country," interim President Roberto Micheletti told the privately owned Channel 5 television network.

"We want to go back to normalcy," Micheletti said.

The interim president said his ministers planned to repeal the 45-day order at a meeting later Monday and it would be lifted as of Tuesday, when their decision is published in the government's official gazette.

Honduras' interim leaders issued the decree Sept. 27 in response to "calls for insurrection" by Zelaya as the ousted president sought refuge in the Brazilian Embassy after sneaking back into the country. He remains holed up in the Embassy with dozens of supporters amid international diplomatic efforts to end the crisis.

The decree empowered police and soldiers to break up public meetings, arrest people without warrants and restrict the news media, with armed troops stationed throughout the capital to enforce the order.

The main effect of the emergency decree was to close down the two main pro-Zelaya media outlets, Radio Globo and Channel 36, and it blocked protest marches for several days. Zelaya supporters eventually ventured out to demonstrate, but in much smaller numbers than before.

While the decree was in force, the government also retook control of a government Agrarian Institute building that had been occupied by protesters. They detained about 55 people and lodged sedition charges against 38, who were still in custody over the weekend.

Police spokesman Orlin Cerrato said about 1,000 people were detained for violating a curfew that was imposed before the decree.

Radio Globo has been broadcasting over the Internet. The station's owner, Alejandro Villatoro, said authorities seized his station's equipment and he did not know when it would be able to resume normal operations.

Zelaya was forced from office with the backing of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court for trying to hold a referendum on rewriting the constitution. His opponents charged he wanted to lift the charter's provision limiting presidents to a single term — an accusation he denies.

With the backing of much of the international community, including the U.S. government, Zelaya is seeking to be reinstated to serve out his term, which ends in January. The U.S. has suspended millions of dollars in aid to Honduras, and its ambassador has refused to meet with Micheletti, in hopes of pressuring the interim government to relinquish power.

The Organization of American States, local representatives of the Catholic Church and others have been meeting with the competing factions, seeking to negotiate an end to the standoff. But the two sides remain divided over key issues, including whether Zelaya can reassume the presidency before scheduled Nov. 29 elections.

Micheletti indicated he was open to Zelaya's reinstatement after the elections. But he also insisted his rival could not be president while charged with abuse of power and other so-called political crimes — and suggested the matter was out of his hands.

"In any case, it would have to be the Supreme Court that takes the decision," he said.

In response, Zelaya told reporters his "reinstatement is not negotiatable." Still, he said he had "faith that this problem will be resolved soon."

Three members of the U.S. Congress were scheduled to meet Monday with Micheletti, officials of his government and others in the country as part of a fact-finding trip. The Florida Republicans — Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and brothers Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart — are among a number of U.S. lawmakers who oppose Zelaya, viewing him with suspicion because of his support from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

"I hope to personally hear about the challenges that the Micheletti government is experiencing as a result of the aid that has been cut off by the misguided U.S. policy that wants to impose Zelaya into power even though he had violated the Honduran constitution," Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement sent by e-mail to The Associated Press.

Lawmakers voted to more than double Haiti's minimum wage Tuesday night after long hours of debate and clashes between police and protesters, who complained they can't feed and shelter their families on the current pay of about $1.75 a day.

The plan adopted fell short of the $5 wage demanded by the demonstrators, although it would more than double the minimum pay to about $3.75 a day.

The raise also would include workers at factories producing clothes for export, an idea that President Rene Preval opposed. After refusing to publish into law a plan passed by Parliament in May to nearly triple the minimum wage, Preval proposed giving the garment factory workers an increase to about $3.

Given the lateness of Parliament's 55-6 vote to adopt the new raise, there was no immediate reaction from the president or from the protesters.

Earlier in the day, police fired tear gas at some 2,000 protesters who gathered outside Parliament to demand a big increase in the minimum wage. As legislators prepared to meet on the issue, some of the protesters threw rocks at police and began ripping down flags of U.N. member countries near the building.

Most of the crowd dispersed before the Parliament session began, with no arrests and only two reported injuries, including a cameraman who was hit in the head with a rock.

Many of the protesters were minimum-wage factory workers, such as Banel Jeune, a 29-year-old father who sews sleeves on shirts.

"Seventy gourdes, that doesn't do anything for me," he said, referring to his current minimum wage. "I can't feed my kids, and I can't send them to school."

The issue has been inflammatory in Haiti, which is the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. But despite the heated debate and occasional violence, few people would be affected by the wage increase.

Most of Haiti's 9 million Haitians who are employed work on small farms or sell basic goods on the street. Only some 250,000 people have jobs covered by the minimum salary law, said lawmaker Steven Benoit, who sponsored the bill.

Still, some development experts argue that a pay increase would hurt plans for fighting Haiti's widespread unemployment by creating more jobs in the factories that produce clothing for export to the United States.

With new trade advantages that allow for duty-free exports of clothing to the U.S., such factories could provide "several hundred thousand jobs to Haitians ... over a period of just a few years," according to a report submitted to the U.N. in January.

But it said that plan requires costs be kept down.

The report had been requested by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and prepared by Oxford University professor Paul Collier. It is now being promoted by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the new U.N. envoy for Haiti.

Three international organizations canceled $1.2 billion of Haiti's debt Tuesday, freeing up millions of dollars each year for the deeply impoverished Caribbean nation that is beset by humanitarian crises.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund said their boards decided this week to forgive Haiti's obligations to the two organizations, a move that triggered previously announced debt relief from the Inter-American Development Bank.

The actions erased nearly two-thirds of Haiti's outstanding debt. As of April, Haiti owned more than $1.9 billion, according to the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

"This is a pretty big victory, definitely. This is what we've been wanting," said Dan Beeton, an analyst with the center, said by phone from Washington. "It's a shame it had to take so long."

Until now, the desperately poor country, where more than 80 percent of its approximately 9 million people live on less than $2 a day, has been paying about $1.6 million each month to the World Bank, according to debt relief advocates at the Jubilee USA Network.

A significant portion of the debt forgiven Tuesday dates back to loans that lined the pockets of Haiti's dictators, especially Francois "Papa Doc" and Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, whose father-son dynasty ended in a 1986 popular rebellion.

Haiti was added to the World Bank and IMF's debt cancellation program for heavily indebted poor countries in 2006. The Inter-American Development Bank previously approved debt relief for Haiti, pending its completion of that program.

But it took several years for Haiti to implement reforms that included auditing government accounts, adopting a law on public procurement and strengthening tax and customs administration, as well as debt reporting. Other steps included approving an AIDS prevention and treatment plan, financing school tuition for children and improving immunization rates.

That was accomplished in spite of years of turmoil, including last year's food riots that toppled the prime minister and four tropical storms that killed some 800 people and caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Finance Minister Daniel Dorsainvil praised the announcement in a statement issued through the World Bank, saying the millions freed up from debt payments "will help us invest in growth and poverty reduction programs."

Others were skeptical about the benefits of the move. Haitian economist Kesner Pharel said debt forgiveness will make it far more difficult for Haiti to get new loans, impeding the government's ability to finance much-needed improvements in infrastructure and other areas.

"I don't see the government for the next five to 10 years having a lot of money. It's a bad idea. It's a cost, not a benefit," Pharel said.

Haiti is the 26th country to have its debt forgiven under the initiative, a list that includes Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Honduras and Bolivia.

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Associated Press writer Jennifer Kay in Miami contributed to this report.

A poll in Peru says President Alan Garcia's approval rating has fallen to its lowest level in 18 months, hurt by a June 5 clash between security forces and Amazonian Indian protesters that killed at least 33 people.

The firm Ipsos Support says only 21 percent of Peruvians surveyed approve of Garcia's management, a drop of nine points since a poll in mid-May. Three-fourths of those polled disapproved of the president's performance.

It is the third consecutive month Garcia's rating has diminished, putting him at his lowest level since December 2008.

Published Sunday in the newspaper Commerce, the poll surveyed 1,000 people in 16 Peruvian cities during June 17-19. The firm says it has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Haitians fed up with chronic poverty and unresponsive leaders stayed away from Senate run-off elections Sunday, ignoring government efforts to improve on the paltry voter turnout that undercut the first round of voting in April.

Results are not expected for at least a week in contests for 11 vacant seats in the 30-member Senate. On the line is President Rene Preval's hope of overpowering uncooperative legislators and pushing through internationally backed economic reforms and constitutional amendments that would give his successors more power.

Voting was extremely light in the capital of Port-au-Prince, though it was too soon to gauge the turnout in the rest of the country.

Another round of mostly empty ballot boxes could embarrass the government and fuel opponents' claims that it has stumbled in developing Haiti as a democracy. The first round of voting April 19, held after more than a year and half of delays, saw only 11 percent of registered voters participate.

Electoral council president Frantz Gerard Verret took to the radio waves Sunday afternoon to plead with voters: "If you don't come out and vote, other people will vote for you."

But as polls closed at 4 p.m. (5 p.m. EDT, 2100 GMT) those pleas appeared to have gone unheeded. Voting centers in the capital stood nearly deserted, with transparent ballot boxes holding just the folded paper ballots of poll workers themselves.

Early reports from the countryside were similar, with Haitian radio highlighting stories such as ballots arriving late to centers where no voters waited.

Two polling places were reported shut down near the southern town of Jacmel. In at least one of those cases, supporters of a candidate ran in and tried to stuff the ballot box, Haitian police spokesman Frantz Lerebours said.

Three people were injured in the Jacmel area and at least one person was killed during a fight between rival supporters in the western town of Grand Anse. Political violence took at least two lives before election day.

Many Haitians said that more than anything, they were discouraged by years of votes cast for politicians who went on to do little to alleviate crushing poverty. Frustrations are running especially high with Preval after he refused last week to enact into law a bill passed by parliament that would raise the minimum wage from less than $2 to about $5.14 a day.

After consulting with business leaders, Preval proposed a compromise that would provide the full increase for some employees, but limit the minimum wage to $3.25 for factory workers who make clothing for export. Parliament will take up the issue next week.

Many people in the slums, who pushed Preval to victory in 2006, called his decision a betrayal.

"Preval put his head together with the elites to make the poor suffer. If he had voted for the ($5.14 a day) I could have voted today. But he didn't, so I won't either," said Marck Harris, 45, who sews Dickies-brand pants while raising eight children in the Cite Soleil slum.

Still, Preval's Lespwa movement could gain as many as eight Senate seats, and with them a potential 14-seat plurality among the chamber's 29 voting members. Only two other parties had multiple candidates advance to the second round, one with five and the other three.

The influential Lavalas party of exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has boycotted the elections since its candidates were disqualified in April on a technicality. Many slum residents, who make up the party's base, said they would have been more likely to vote had a Lavalas candidate participated.

"This is one of the crises of the election: that Lavalas is excluded," said a party supporter, David Choudelor, 21.

In addition to disgruntlement with Haiti's leaders, many potential voters were leery of going to the polls after weeks of violent protests, fueled by political tensions over the run-offs as well as next year's planned presidential election.

Tensions also are high over the presence of 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers, who have been in Haiti since the 2004 rebellion that overthrew Aristide.

A young man was killed Thursday when mourners and U.N. peacekeepers clashed during a funeral procession for a popular priest closely linked with Aristide. The death is under investigation.

On Sunday, student protesters threw rocks at peacekeepers and police near Haiti's state university medical campus, and security force responded with tear gas. It was the first time students protested on a Sunday since beginning a strike a month ago to demand curriculum changes, an increase in Haiti's minimum wage and the departure of U.N. troops.

John Calvin, the Great Reformer, used dictatorial means in making Geneva a "Protestant Rome," but he also planted the seeds of modern democracy.

He enforced rigid morality and stressed the importance of helping others, while he also had a share in developing capitalism. He supported the destruction of religious statues and other images, but described the arts as gifts from God.

This is how Calvin's role in history is being assessed by theologians and historians in countless lectures, studies and biographies 500 years after he was born on July 10, 1509. The quincentenary is being observed around the globe with the Geneva-based World Alliance of Reformed Churches acting as a central organizer of "Calvin 09."

Although he remains a controversial figure, Calvin's teachings are still profoundly influential. Events marking the Calvin year range from congresses and exhibitions to concerts and theater performances. His portrait is on a special Swiss postage stamp and souvenirs are for sale.

"John Calvin Superstar, Geneva celebrates its saint," the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung headlined an article on the "Calvinomania."

The anniversary festivities contrast with Calvin's very modest life.

Born into a middle-class Roman Catholic family in the little French town of Noyon, north of Paris, Calvin became a lawyer, but soon came to sympathize with the anti-papal theses of Martin Luther that had rapidly spread to France.

Calvin broke with his Catholic past. His great rhetorical talents earned him quick prominence as an evangelical teacher, but religious turmoil forced him to go into exile in Basel, Switzerland.

He was 26 when he began writing the "Institutes of the Christian Religion," the first compendium of Reformed doctrines, much more profound than Luther's theses of 1517. They won him an invitation from newly Protestant Geneva. But Calvin was soon banished again because authorities found his ideas were too radical.

He returned in 1541 after receiving assurances of official support for his plans to complete a Reformation based on his teachings. He introduced a revolutionary church constitution based on the democratic principles of division of powers. But he retained the ultimate say.

Calvin drew up an extensive catalog of austere rules of morality. These ranged from bans on swearing, gambling and fornication to a strict no to dancing, even at weddings. Unexcused absence from worship service was penalized.

Adultery and homosexuality could draw severe sentences, even death.

But it took more than 10 years before the Reformation consolidated its position against native discontent. Calvin also had to cope with social conflicts between the Genevans and the thousands of French and other refugees seeking exile in the city.

Karl Barth, one of the most influential Reformed 20th century theologians, once criticized Calvin's rigor in controlling Geneva as being near to tyranny and Pharisaism and said, "None of us would have liked to live there".

In contrast, John Knox, the enthusiastic Scottish follower of Calvin, spoke of "the most godly city since the day of the apostles." Knox was minister of a growing congregation of English exiles before he was able to return and become founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

According to Dutch church historian Herman J. Selderhuis, a negative image of Calvin has remained prevalent at least in Western Europe. That image is based on the execution of Michael Servetus, a Spanish theologian whose non-orthodox views were judged by Calvin as heretical.

When he sought refuge in Geneva, Servetus was imprisoned and burned at the stake. Selderhuis says Calvin thus "acted against his own conviction that an opinion cannot be forcefully imposed on anyone."

Geneva was then already a flourishing European trading center and the influx of wealthy refugees and craftsmen caused a further boost in the economy from banking to watch making.

To Calvin, patient labor and diligence through the six-day work week was equal to worship service and the wealth thus obtained was justified. But he stood for social solidarity with the poor, refugees and others and rigid morality in economic affairs.

Calvin was a vociferous foe of usury. Still, he granted legitimacy to raising moderate interest in business contacts, although not for loans to the poor. His move is widely seen as a first step toward modern economics and a responsible form of capitalism.

Calvin's ban on religious art in Reformed churches had a welcome effect, especially among Dutch and Flemish artists who shifted to landscapes, still lifes, and portraits that found a large market among prosperous middle classes.

In the late 18th century Calvinist-descended churches began to take root in wide parts of the United States, among Presbyterians and others. Gradually, the movement spread to other parts in the world but the Reformed church became deeply divided. The World Alliance of Reform Churches says its fellowship now includes 75 million Reformed Christians in more than 100 countries. But in Geneva, Reformed Christians have long since shrunk to a small minority.

Yet the Calvinist impact remains evident in the city. The Geneva-based International Red Cross was founded by a devout Calvinist, Henry Dunant. And the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations, was set up in Geneva because U.S President Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, preferred the city to Catholic Brussels.

Before Calvin died in 1564, he had stipulated that his body be buried without a gravestone in Geneva's common cemetery. It was the end of a life in modesty of a man for whom, as he once wrote, describing his theology as "Calvinism" was an "insult."

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On the Net:

World Alliance of Reformed Churches: http://warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/side.jsp?news(underscore)id2&part2(underscore)id19&navi8

The rampant growth of urban slums around the world and weather extremes linked to climate change have sharply increased the risks from "megadisasters" such as devastating floods and cyclones, a U.N. report said Sunday.

The study — which examines natural disaster trends and strategies to reduce potential catastrophes — also noted that millions of people in rural areas are at higher risk from disasters such as landslides where forests have been stripped away or crippling droughts blamed on shifting rainfall patterns.

Much of nearly 200-page report restates warnings from previous studies about unchecked urban growth and shortsighted rural planning. But it also seeks to sharpen the apparent link between climate change and the severity and frequency of major natural disasters including severe droughts and epic storms.

"Climate change magnifies the interactions between disaster risk and poverty. On the one hand, it magnifies weather-related and climatic hazards. On the other hand, it will decrease the resilience of many poor households and communities to absorb the impact and recover," said the report, which was released in the Gulf nation of Bahrain.

At least 900 million people now live in shantytowns and other makeshift settlements in cities vulnerable to disasters such as cyclones, flooding or earthquakes, the report said. Those populations are growing at a rate of about 25 million a year, it said.

One model predicted many of the more than 19 million people in greater Manila would be swamped by a tsunami hitting the capital of the Philippines.

India, China and other parts of Asia were at a particularly high risk from so-called "megadisasters" such as last year's Cyclone Nargis, which killed an estimated 140,000 people in Myanmar, and the massive quake in China that claimed nearly 90,000 lives and left 5 million people homeless.

"Asia was hit especially hard," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was in Bahrain for the release of the report.

He said more than 300 natural disasters around the world last year caused more than $180 billion in damage.

"The linkages between disaster risk, poverty and climate change ... form a particularly tightly interlocked group of global challenges," the report said.

The lead author, Andrew Maskrey, acknowledged it was impossible to halt the migration to cities by people seeking work.

"But there are ways to alleviate the conditions of intense poverty if leaders choose to take the steps," he said. "It's all about whether there is the political will."

Maskrey noted initiatives in several cities, including Bogota, Columbia, and Karachi, Pakistan, to try to improve conditions in squatter settlements and shantytowns.

"There are all these factors coming together: urban poverty, climate change, migration to cities from rural areas," he said. "We're saying: This is bringing about a situation of impending catastrophes, but there's also something we can do about it to lower the risks."

President Barack Obama says he came to a summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to listen and learn about a region he'd never visited. On Saturday, Hugo Chavez gave him some reading material that the Venezuelan president thinks will help.

The socialist leader presented Obama with a hardcover edition of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent," by famed Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano.

Chavez said he inscribed the book: "For Obama, with warm regards."

The 1971 book documents how European and American commercial interests have dominated and afflicted Latin America since the Spanish conquest, and it's a favorite among left-leaning Latin Americans from Argentina to Mexico.

"He believes the book tells the truth, and he wants to give Obama the truth," said Michael Shifter, a Latin America analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue group think tank in Washington.

"It also gives him an opportunity to grandstand a bit" at an event where Obama's sheer star quality is outshining other leaders.

Chavez says he frequently rereads Galeano as a reference point.

One emblematic passage describes how Latin America "continues to work as a servant. It continues to exist to serve the needs of others as a fountain and reserve of petroleum and gold, copper and meat, fruits and coffee, raw materials and food destined for rich countries that benefit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them."

Novelist Isabel Allende describes the book's enduring appeal as politically charged history with an intimate touch: "Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation."

Persecution of Galeano by right-wing dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s helped cement the author's reputation as a voice of Latin America's dispossessed.

His newspaper editorials and activism against political corruption in Uruguay forced him to flee to Argentina after a military coup in 1974. His name later appeared an Argentine death squad list targeting dissidents, and Galeano fled to Spain to live in exile until his return to Uruguay in 1984.

"It's an extraordinary book that helped me understand Latin America when I was young, our history, our reality," Chavez told reporters after meeting with Obama and South American leaders.

Obama, the author of two best-selling books himself, may have trouble with the copy presented by Chavez. Images of the encounter showed that the title was in Spanish, and Obama doesn't speak or read the language.

___

Passages from "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent":

_"Development develops inequality."

_"The international division of labor is that some countries specialize in winning and others losing."

_"... The Cuban economy was modeled on foreign demands for sugar. The slaves produced the coveted product destined for the world market, but their profits would since be enjoyed by the local oligarchy and imperialist interests."

_"The International Monetary Fund was created to institutionalize the financial domination of Wall Street over the entire planet when, at the end of World War II, the dollar began its hegemony as the international currency. It was never unfaithful to its master."

(This version CORRECTS the first name of book author Eduardo Galeano.))

A U.N. Security Council delegation praised the party of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Saturday for fighting to overturn the disqualification of its Senate candidates, saying it could help avert a potentially dangerous crisis.

Haiti's provisional electoral council has barred Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party from participating in next month's Senate elections for largely technical reasons, angering supporters who have threatened to sabotage the vote. Observers fear the council's decision could lead to violence.

On Saturday, the U.N. delegation held separate meetings with the electoral council and political parties including Lavalas as part of a four-day visit to the desperately poor Caribbean nation.

"The country cannot allow a political crisis," said Jorge Urbina, Costa Rica's representative to the United Nations, who spoke for the delegation at a news conference. "All members of the council were glad to hear from (Lavalas) that they are using every legal instrument in their power to reverse this decision."

Elections for 12 of the Senate's 30 seats originally were scheduled for late 2007. But they have been repeatedly delayed by riots, hurricanes and infighting on a previous electoral council, which President Rene Preval ultimately dissolved. As a result, one-third of the Senate has been vacant since last year.

The trouble with the Lavalas slate owes to divisions between two rival factions that split over the party's direction after Aristide was ousted by a rebellion in 2004. Each faction submitted its own, separate list of candidates. Both were rejected because of a failure to produce documents signed by Aristide, who lives in South Africa.

Lavalas executive council head Maryse Narcisse said legal appeals are continuing and candidates from one Lavalas slate will begin campaigning as scheduled on Monday.

Also Saturday, protesters clashed with police in the Central Plateau town of Cornillon to prevent the seating of a local elections board, leading the area's representative in parliament to call for the elections to again be postponed, Radio Kiskeya reported.

Global climate change threatens the complete disappearance of the Andes' tropical glaciers within the next 20 years, putting precious water, energy and food sources at risk, according to a World Bank report presented here Tuesday.

The study says glacial retreat has already reduced by 12 percent the water supply to Peru's dry coastline, home to 60 percent of the country's population.

"In Peru, (the glaciers) are melting very quickly. More than 20 percent of the glacial ice caps have disappeared since the 1970s," World Bank climate change specialist Walter Vergara told reporters in the capital, Lima.

The report says that in neighboring Bolivia, the Chacaltaya glacier has lost 82 percent of its surface area since 1982. Meanwhile the Ecuadorean capital of Quito could face increased water costs of up to $100 million annually in the next 10 years as rising temperatures deplete nearby glaciers, Vergara said.

The World Bank study on climate change in Latin America warns of three other major threats besides glacier disappearance: the destruction of coral reefs by warming oceans, which could cause the Caribbean basin's ecosystem to "collapse"; wetlands devastation in the Gulf of Mexico due to deforestation, pollution and land development; and the risk of reduced rainfall drying large swaths of the Amazon jungle.

Bank staffers said that if nothing is done to combat global climate change and reverse the trends, those threats could have profound social and economic effects.

Glacier retreat could devastate the supply of drinking water and agriculture in the Andean nations, they said, while also hurting hydroelectric power generation that makes up 50 percent of energy production in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Pablo Fajnzylber, the World Bank's senior economist for the Latin American region, warned that agricultural production in South America as a whole will drop 12 to 50 percent by 2100 if new technologies and more resistant seeds are not introduced.

Fajnzylber acknowledged that reversing climate change has taken a back seat to the global financial meltdown, but said the crisis actually presents an opportunity for nations to encourage investment in renewable and efficient energy.

The Bank also announced Tuesday it has approved a $330 million loan to help Peru's newly created Environment Ministry regulate mining, fishing and transportation, and protect the country's forests and biodiversity.

Stop smooching.

That's the message of a new sign that went up outside a train station in northern England on Monday.

The goal is to stop departing passengers from pulling up in their cars at a crowded drop-off point and pausing to kiss each other farewell.

Virgin Rail says it installed the sign while refurbishing the station after a local business networking group said the place had to become more efficient.

But profit margins may have been a factor, too.

Virgin Rail says that if passengers want to share an embrace before they part company, they should pay to park their cars nearby where they can kiss all they want.

The farmer camps in a crude tent of broken sandbags as he guards the foundation of his destroyed home and his last possessions: a pickax, a hoe and some charcoal.

This is the third time Olisten Elerius is preparing to build his tiny cinderblock house. Four years ago, Tropical Storm Jeanne flooded it and drowned his father, sister and nephew. Then, late this summer, Tropical Storm Hanna swallowed it along with his daughter and another sister. It could happen again.

After Jeanne struck in 2004, more than $70 million in aid went to immediate relief such as food, medical aid and jobs, but little went to flood control, according to an Associated Press review of relief spending. Despite pledges to prevent such devastation in the future, few projects to build drains, fix roads and stop erosion were even attempted.

In other parts of Haiti, U.S. officials launched an ambitious flood control project. But it took 3 1/2 years to plan and was not placed in Gonaives because of a lack of funding.

So when four major storms hit within a month this year, nothing stopped the La Quinte River from roaring over its banks again. It inundated farmers like Elerius on its way to the center of Gonaives, where men, women and children swam for miles through swirling waters to escape. The storms killed 793 people and caused $1 billion in damage.

"The authorities were always coming here to take pictures and measure things," Elerius said. "The words in their mouths said they would help, but they never did anything."

Top officials agree that efforts fell short.

"I think we were very successful in getting Gonaives back on its feet," Alexandre Deprez, an official for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said of the work after Jeanne. "But it is true that we didn't put the time and the resources to do what needs to be done in the longer term."

___

Haiti's floods are not natural disasters, but a direct result of widespread deforestation, erosion and poverty. Farmers cut trees for charcoal and plant shallow-rooted crops. Rains that would be forgotten elsewhere can kill thousands.

In 2004, Elerius was working in the neighboring Dominican Republic when Tropical Storm Jeanne came twisting like a wounded animal out of the northern sky, sending a wall of water through his cinderblock home and sweeping away his father, sister and nephew. Gonaives residents fled to their rooftops as rivers broke their banks, overflowing morgues with bloated corpses.

A horrified world pledged to help. Elerius returned home just as the money and the white SUVs of non-governmental organizations began flowing into Gonaives, in the north of Haiti.

The U.N. appealed for $37 million in flood relief. Washington would donate more than $45 million, first for emergency food and supplies and then through USAID for the two-year, $34 million Tropical Storm Jeanne Recovery Program.

Disaster officials, newspapers and aid workers called for well-planned, well-financed, long-term aid. Haitian officials told the agencies to spend the money on projects that would save lives: secure rivers, fix roads, design better canals, build homes with better drainage to the sea.

But the U.N. member states, distracted by the Indian Ocean tsunami four months later, raised less than half their funding target.

Work was hampered by violence and insecurity. The Inter-American Development Bank provided about $10 million in loans, mostly for construction of a small drainage system. That project was abandoned by Haitian contractors after bandits stole the cement and steel, IDB representative Philippe Dewez said.

Washington sent money mostly for short-term projects: cleanup, restoration and repair of basic services such as schools, health clinics, roads, bridges and homes. In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that U.S. organizations cleared more than 2 million cubic feet of mud and restored the livelihoods of 48,000 people. But the GAO said they failed to meet an already reduced target for houses and completed no roads or bridges.

Elerius rebuilt his family's flimsy home at Mapou, a flat plain on the outskirts of the city, just 50 feet from the La Quinte River after it descends from barren mountains toward the sea.

On the denuded hillside, USAID said projects to grow plant cover and build terraces have restored 3,700 acres of the La Quinte watershed — 2 percent of the basin. But few trees are visible, and local officials said most saplings were eaten by goats.

Corruption watchdogs with Transparency International said public funds — nobody seems to know exactly how much — were distributed with little oversight by the U.S.-backed interim government.

Soon after Jeanne, USAID commissioned a study of Haiti's watersheds, which led to an ambitious $18 million effort to reduce flooding. Work did not begin until February 2008.

The report recommended action in high-risk flood areas, including Gonaives. But the U.S. Congress only gave enough money for the agency to start in two smaller, less populated watersheds — Limbe in the north and Mountrouis in the west, both more than 40 miles away from Gonaives. Some money went to a project on a Port-au-Prince river this year.

"With the funding that we were given we said to ourselves, 'Why go into a place where you're not going to make a difference?' " Deprez told The Associated Press. "Go into a place where you can focus and make a difference and test the approach that was recommended."

It will take five years to know the effects of the pilot flood-control programs. Officials then hope to replicate them elsewhere.

But the storms didn't wait.

___

Starting in mid-August, Tropical Storm Fay hit Haiti, followed by Gustav, Hanna and Ike. They destroyed thousands of homes, devastated crops and set the country back decades. Starving families, whose plight had fueled April riots, got even hungrier.

On the dark afternoon of Sept. 2 in Gonaives, there was no warning as mountain run-off began to gather in ravines. Officials were not given orders to evacuate, and in any case no plan was in place. There was nobody to clear fallen trees that had jammed a bridge on the La Quinte River and caused it to divert the day before.

Elerius was in town getting supplies when he heard radio reports about a new storm. Even as rain fell in Gonaives, radio broadcasts in Port-Au-Prince, the capital, repeated predictions that it would veer to the north, away from Haiti.

It was only word of mouth that sent Elerius running home. There he found the river had again become an ocean, his family submerged and his house disintegrating.

He dived into the water and pulled his mother and 4-year-old son Jonslay to safety. Then he yelled for his 6-year-old daughter, Joniska, and his 21-year-old little sister, Jimele.

Neither called back.

This time, without a network of roads that could withstand the flooding, Gonaives was trapped. A Haitian-funded causeway needed to connect it to the capital, 80 miles away across the cactus plain of Savanne Desolee, was left half-finished, denying scores of families a way out. Refugees climbed its scaffolding to escape the rising waters.

Others were stranded on their rooftops. It took four days for the U.N. to bring in ample food aid by ship.

Some development workers say the reduced death toll this year — in the hundreds instead of thousands — validates their efforts. But survivors and local officials say more survived this time because the memory of Jeanne sent them running for higher ground.

Today in Gonaives, homeless families crowd tent neighborhoods. Men scrounge for fish in stagnant floodwaters. Schoolgirls wear sunglasses and surgical masks to block the clouds of dirt that cover the city. The road to Port-au-Prince is still blocked by an enormous lake.

As former Gonaives disaster management coordinator Faustin Joseph said, "Everybody failed."

The craggy roads of Gonaives are filled again with white SUVs. The U.N. issued a $107 million appeal, of which it has raised about half, and is now requesting $20 million more. The World Food Program has delivered more than 11,000 tons of food. The Haitian government has set aside $198 million for rebuilding roads, fortifying river beds and restoring agriculture.

The U.S. government pledged more than $30 million in immediate relief. Another $96 million from Congress is on its way.

President Rene Preval told the U.N. General Assembly in September he feared that "once this first wave of humanitarian compassion is exhausted, we will be left as always, truly alone, to face new catastrophes and see restarted, as if in a ritual, the same exercises of mobilization."

Some in Gonaives have become restless.

"If things go like they did after Jeanne again, and it looks like people are doing nothing, we might get up and start burning things down," said Odrigue Toussaint, 40, who has not worked since he lost his motorcycle to Hanna. "We will let the authorities know it can't happen again."

Elerius sent his son, mother and siblings to live with neighbors. He never found the bodies of his sister and daughter.

He sleeps on the dirty ground under the plastic tent. Inside it's stiflingly hot during the day but cooler at night.

The La Quinte River gouged a shallow canyon through what was once his farmland, where he planted onions, plantains and potatoes. The topsoil washed to the streets of Gonaives, encasing the city in mud.

Haitian construction crews put the river back into its bed a week after Hanna, just as they did after Jeanne, and built temporary levies with gravel and sandbags that Elerius pilfered to make his tent. The bags were falling apart anyway, he said.

The farmer who keeps losing everything is resigned.

"Whatever they do now we'll accept it," Elerius said. "I just wish they would have already done more."

The Vatican is endorsing new technology that brings the book of daily prayers used by priests straight onto iPhones.

The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes application created by a technologically savvy Italian priest, the Rev. Paolo Padrini, and an Italian Web designer.

The application includes the Breviary prayer book — in Italian, English, Spanish, French and Latin and, in the near future, Portuguese and German. Another section includes the prayers of the daily Mass, and a third contains various other prayers.

After a free trial period in which the iBreviary was downloaded approximately 10,000 times in Italy, an official version was released earlier this month, Padrini said.

The application costs euro0.79 ($1.10), while upgrades will be free. Padrini's proceeds are going to charity.

Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, praised the new application Monday, saying the Church "is learning to use the new technologies primarily as a tool or as a mean of evangelizing, as a way of being able to share its own message with the world."

Pope Benedict XVI, a classical music lover who was reportedly given an iPod in 2006, has sought to reach out to young people through new media. During last summer's World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia, he sent out mobile phone text messages citing scripture to thousands of registered pilgrims — signed with the tagline "BXVI."

The 5-year-old teetered on broomstick legs — he weighed less than 20 pounds, even after days of drinking enriched milk. Nearby, a 4-year-old girl hung from a strap attached to a scale, her wide eyes lifeless, her emaciated arms dangling weakly.

In pockets of Haiti accessible only by donkey or foot, children are dying of malnutrition — their already meager food supply cut by a series of devastating storms that destroyed crops, wiped out livestock and sent food prices spiraling.

At least 26 severely malnourished children have died in the past four weeks in the remote region of Baie d'Orange in Haiti's southeast, aid workers said Thursday, and there are fears the toll will rise much higher if help does not come quickly to the impoverished Caribbean nation.

Another 65 severely malnourished children are being treated in makeshift tent clinics in the mountainous area, or at hospitals where they were evacuated in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere, said Max Cosci, who heads the Belgian contingent of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

One evacuee, a 7-year-old girl, died while being treated, Cosci said, adding: "The situation is extremely, extremely fragile and dangerous."

At a makeshift malnutrition ward at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the capital, 10 emaciated children were under emergency care Thursday, their stomachs swollen and hair faded by pigmentation loss caused by malnutrition. Several had the puffy faces typical of kwashiorkor, a protein-deficiency disorder.

Five-year-old Mackenson Duclair, his ribs protruding and his legs little more than skin stretched over bones, weighed in at 19.8 pounds, even after days of drinking milk enriched with potassium and salt. Doctors said he needed to gain another five pounds before he could go home.

Dangling from a scale mounted from the ceiling, 4-year-old Venecia Lonis looked as limp as a rag doll as doctors weighed her, her huge brown eyes expressionless, her hair tied with bright yellow bows.

Mackenson's grandmother, who has raised him since his mother died, said she barely has a can of corn grits to feed herself, the boy and her 8-year-old granddaughter each day.

"These things did not happen when I was growing up," 72-year-old Ticouloute Fortune said.

Rural families already struggling with soaring food prices in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, lost their safety nets when fields were destroyed and livestock wiped out by the storms, which killed nearly 800 people and caused $1 billion worth of damage in August and September.

U.N. World Food Program country director Myrta Kaulard said she fears more deaths from malnutrition in other isolated parts of Haiti, and search and medical teams were fanning out in the northwest and along the southwestern peninsula to check.

The World Food Program has sent more than 30 tons of food aid — enough to feed 5,800 people for two weeks — into the remote southeastern region since September, and other groups funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development have sent food as well, she said.

But the steep, narrow paths and poor visibility make it difficult to deliver the food to the mountain communities where hunger is worsening. In one case, a WFP truck flipped over while struggling up a hill and slid into a ravine, killing an aid worker.

"There is always a bottleneck. The same situation that the people are facing is the same situation we're also facing," Kaulard told The Associated Press Thursday.

Haiti in general and the mountain villages in particular have long suffered from chronic hunger. Child malnutrition rates have been high for years — the WFP reported in 2007 that nearly a quarter of children were chronically malnourished.

Remote rural areas in particular grow only enough staples to feed themselves less than seven months out of the year, Kaulard said.

But throughout the year, aid workers and officials have been seeing hunger get more severe, and now people who live in the mountains and aid groups who are working there say the situation is worse than it has been in the past.

This year, for instance, Haiti's agriculture ministry estimates 60 percent of the harvest was lost in the storms nationwide. Land quality is already poor and farmers lost seeds for next year when the storms hit, Kaulard said.

Effects of the storms vary widely from village to village and even family to family. In some places, food supplies seem intact. In others, Doctors Without Borders has found rates of severe malnutrition as high as 5 percent.

Aid shortages may soon compound the problem. Donor countries have funded only a third of the U.N.'s $105 million aid appeal for Haiti following the storms, and resources could run out in January, Kaulard said.

At the hospital Thursday, Enock Augustin sat beside the bed where his 5-year-old daughter Bertha was sleeping. The fragile-looking child was evacuated by helicopter Nov. 8 with vomiting and diarrhea. When she arrived, nearly a quarter of her body weight was due to fluid retention, a sign of severe protein deficiency.

The swelling gradually receded as she was fed nutrient-enriched milk and treated with antibiotics and anti-worm medicine; she shrank to just 21 pounds.

She has since gained about two pounds but can't go home until she reaches 26 pounds, doctors said.

For months, the Augustin family had gotten by despite the soaring prices of corn grits and imported rice because they grew potatoes, which they could eat or barter for plantains, yams and breadfruit that did not fluctuate with the world market.

But then, in August, Tropical Storm Fay hit, followed by Hurricane Gustav, Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Ike.

"Every time a hurricane came through, it killed our animals and plants," said Augustin, a father of six. The road was washed out, markets became unreachable and "the price of everything went sky high."

The entire family subsisted on two cups of corn grits, and Bertha began shrinking — and then swelling — before his eyes.

"She was really bad. We put her in the helicopter and they brought her here," Augustin said. "I hope the government will hear about us and bring more support."

Almost two-thirds of people - 60% - in 26 countries say higher food and energy prices this year have affected them "a great deal", a BBC report has found.

It's a forgotten melody, sketched in black ink in a swift but sure hand. The single manuscript page, long hidden in a provincial French library, has been verified as the work of Mozart, the apparent underpinnings for a Mass he never composed.

The previously undocumented music fragment gives insight into Mozart's evolving composition style and provides a clue about the role religion may have played for the composer as his life neared its turbulent end, one prominent Mozart expert says.

A library in Nantes, western France, has had the fragment in its collection since the 19th century, but it had never been authenticated until now, partly because it does not bear Mozart's signature.

Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said Thursday that there is no doubt that the single sheet, the top third of which has been cut off, was written by the composer.

"His handwriting is absolutely clearly identifiable," he added. "There's no doubt that this is an original piece handwritten by Mozart."

Leisinger said the work had been "entirely forgotten." Such a find is rare: The last time unknown music in Mozart's handwriting came to light was in 1996, when a portion of an aria was sold at Christie's, Leisinger said.

The library does not plan to sell, but if it did, the single sheet would likely be worth around $100,000, the expert said. In all, only about 100 such examples of musical drafts by Mozart are known.

There have been up to 10 Mozart discoveries of such importance over the past 50 years, Leisinger said.

The sheet was bequeathed to Nantes' library by a collector in the 19th century, along with one letter from Mozart as well as one from his father. Both the letters were published in Mozart's complete correspondence, said Agnes Marcetteau, director of Nantes' municipal library.

In an annotation dated Aug. 18, 1839, Aloys Fuchs, a well-respected autograph hunter who collected works from more than 1,500 musicians, authenticated that the handwriting was that of "W.A. Mozart."

But strangely, the work never attracted much attention, partly because it did not bear Mozart's signature and partly because the catalog notation about it was extremely brief and bland, Leisinger said.

The library contacted Leisinger to authenticate the work last year.

Some of the first part of the fragment is in D minor, while the second is in D major and marked "Credo" — a major clue that the work is a sketch for a Mass, which typically includes such a movement, said Robert D. Levin, a professor at Harvard University who is well-known for completing unfinished works by Mozart.

Circumstantial evidence, including the type of paper, suggests Mozart did not write the material before 1787, said Leisinger. Mozart died in 1791 at the age of 35.

"What this sketch leaf confirms in a most vivid way is Mozart's true interest in writing church music toward the end of his life," Levin said.

Mozart had planned to become the choir and music director of Vienna's main cathedral, although he died before he could take up the post. But because Mozart had become a Freemason, some have questioned the sincerity of his interest in religious composition at that period of his life, Leisinger said.

Mozart's famous Requiem, unfinished at his death, was commissioned by a mysterious benefactor. But the rediscovered fragment likely stemmed from inspiration alone and suggests "to a certain degree that being a Freemason and a Roman Catholic was not a real contradiction" in Mozart's eyes, Leisinger said.

For anyone who wants to try sight-reading the fragment, a bit of detective work is required. Musicians must work out the key signature and clef based on other clues in the music. The tempo is also mysterious. And there is no orchestration.

"It's a melody sketch, so what's missing is the harmony and the instrumentation, but you can make sense out of it," Leisinger said. "The tune is complete."

Philip Gossett, a music historian and a professor in music at the University of Chicago, urged caution about interpreting the fragment.

"It is certainly not something that can just be scored up and played as Mozart's," he said.

Nonetheless, modern-day composers are going to take a crack at an orchestration. And in January of next year, the Nantes library says, Mozart's 18th century Mass is expected to have its first performance.

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Associated Press writers John Leicester in Paris and Carley Petesch and Barbara Whitaker in New York contributed to this report.

Burning food while people starve? The U.S. has much to answer for with its ethanol promoting policies.

The head of the UN World Food Programme has said urgent action is required to stimulate food production and help the poor cope with soaring food prices.

Josette Sheeran told the BBC that an additional 100 million people, who did not need assistance six months ago, could not now afford to purchase food.

A sharp rise in food prices has developed into a global crisis, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday.

Ban said the U.N and all members of the international community were very concerned and immediate action was needed.

He spoke to reporters at U.N. offices in Austria, where he was meeting with the nation's top leaders for talks on how the United Nations and European Union can forge closer ties.

"This steeply rising price of food — it has developed into a real global crisis," Ban said, adding that the World Food Program has made an urgent appeal for additional $755 million.

"The United Nations is very much concerned, as (are) all other members of the international community," Ban said. "We must take immediate action in a concerted way."

Ban urged leaders of the international community to sit down together on an "urgent basis" to discuss how to improve economic distribution systems and promote the production of agricultural products.

An estimated 40 percent increase in food prices since last year has sparked violent protests in the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia.

On Thursday, U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization chief Jacques Diouf said immediate efforts should focus on helping farmers in developing countries grow more crops.

Josette Sheeran, the World Food Program's executive director, has likened the price increases to a "silent tsunami," and said requests for food aid are coming in from countries unable to cope with the rising prices.

She noted that the price of rice has more than doubled since March. The World Bank estimates that food prices have increased by 83 percent in three years.

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Associated Press correspondent Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

A little girl with pigtails in a pink dress pats down an Israeli soldier standing spread-eagle against the wall. Down the road, another soldier has stopped a donkey for questioning and is checking its ID.

Nearby, a large rat holding a slingshot appears ready to launch a few stones as he gazes up at Israel's towering concrete wall separating Bethlehem from Israel.

This is "Santa's Ghetto," an ongoing collaborative graffiti project that has evolved into the biggest artistic assault on Israel's separation barrier and the latest hope among Bethlehem's leaders to draw tourists back to this troubled town during the Christmas season.

Almost nonstop, gargantuan 145-ton trucks rumble through China's biggest open-pit coal mine, sending up clouds of soot as they dump their loads into mechanized sorters.

The black treasure has transformed this once-isolated crossroads nestled in the sand-sculpted ravines of Inner Mongolia into a bleak boomtown of nearly 300,000 people. Day and night, long and dusty trains haul out coal to electric power plants and factories in the east, fueling China's explosive growth.

Coal is big, and getting bigger. As oil and natural gas prices soar, the world is relying ever more on the cheap, black-burning mainstay of the Industrial Revolution. Mining companies are racing into Africa. Workers are laying miles of new railroad track to haul coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.

And nowhere is coal bigger than in China.

But the explosion of coal comes amid rising alarm over its dire consequences for workers and the environment. An average of 13 Chinese miners die every day in explosions, floods, fires and cave-ins. Toxic clouds of mercury and other chemicals from mining are poisoning the air and water far beyond China's borders and polluting the food chain.

So far, attempts to clean up coal have largely not worked. Technology to reduce or cut out carbon dioxide emissions is expensive and years away from widespread commercial use.

"Not very many people are talking about what do we do to live with the consequences of what's happening," said James Brock, a longtime industry consultant in the Beijing office of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "The polar bears are doomed — they're going to museums. At the end of this century the Arctic ice cap will be gone. That means a lot of water rising, not by inches but meters."

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Burned since ancient times, coal dramatically increased in use during the Industrial Revolution, when it became fuel for the new steam engines, gas lamps and electrical generators. Worldwide demand for coal dipped at the end of the 20th century, but is now back up and projected to rise 60 percent by 2030 to 6.9 billion tons a year, according to the International Energy Agency.

Today, most coal goes to electrical power plants. In developing nations such as India, China and Africa, coal is the staple — and affordable — source of fuel with which families run their first washing machines and televisions. Worldwide electricity consumption is expected to double by 2030, the World Energy Council says.

In America, about 150 new coal-fired electrical plants are proposed over the next decade. In China, there are plans for a coal-fired power plant to go on line nearly every week. Emissions from these plants alone could nullify the cuts made by Europe, Japan and other rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol treaty, according to a report from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

In a developing country like China, coal is the backbone of the energy system.

Look at the port city of Shanghai, where the bitter tang in the air is not from salty sea breeze — it's the smoke from coal-burning stoves in the suburbs used for cooking and heating. From the shacks of migrant workers on the edge of town to modern factories and skyscrapers, China's biggest city is powered by coal. Even the ultramodern Maglev railway line runs on electricity from a coal-fueled plant.

China mined a record 2.4 billion tons of coal in 2006, up 8.1 percent from a year earlier. But even that can't keep boilers and blast furnaces stoked in an economy growing more than 10 percent a year. So China became a net coal importer for the first time this year. While Chinese authorities are closing down older, heavily polluting plants, they can't keep up with a massive expansion in urban housing and industry and the coal that feeds them.

China is the world's biggest consumer and producer of coal, but it's far from the only one. U.S. coal production hit a record 1.2 billion tons last year, according to the National Mining Association, and is forecast by the government to rise 50 percent by 2030. Yet the United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that the required emissions cuts could slow economic growth.

For another measure, look at the ticker on the Web site of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal Co., the world's largest coal mining company, which tracks its growing sales second by second. Last year: 248 million tons sold. For 2007: On track for up to 275 million tons.

China's Shenhua Group is hot on Peabody's heels. On one day in June, a record 111 Shenhua coal trains left its mines in north-central China, the company said.

Rising demand can be met because coal is the Earth's most abundant fossil fuel, with reserves expected to last some 250 years — far longer than forecasts for petroleum. And whether in China, India, the United States or Europe, coal is available at home, away from the instability of the Middle East.

"The U.S. has under its own soil at least a 200-year supply of coal. China has a very long-term supply of coal," Steve Papermaster, co-chairman of the energy committee of President Bush's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, told a recent conference in Shanghai.

For several years, cleaner burning natural gas appeared a promising substitute. But soaring prices and worries over the reliability of Mideast and Russian supplies have dimmed the promise of that option. Alternatives such as wind and solar power are getting cheaper but still can't compete with coal.

Most experts believe that whatever the costs to the environment and public health, coal is with us to stay.

"The question is not about putting a line through coal and saying we're not going to use it," said Milton Catelin, chief executive of the London-based World Coal Institute, an industry association. "There's a future for coal. The developing world will have to use coal. They need cheap energy to get ahead."

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The solution Catelin and others in the industry are pushing is clean technology, although they admit they are late to the game.

"The decade 1997-2007 was a lost decade" for clean coal technology, Catelin conceded. "We should have done much more. Now we're playing catch-up."

The need is clear. In the provincial steel town of Baotou, trucks heaped high with coal rumble into Shenhua yards, dumping their loads into huge sieves for sorting into various grades of quality and size. Wind gusts whip black soot into the sky, thickening the layer of smog from the city's smelters.

The U.S. and Chinese governments are subsidizing the development of technology that converts coal to a clean-burning gas before it is burned. But such plants still emit ample amounts of carbon dioxide, notes Qian Jingjing, an expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York and co-author of the report "Coal in a Changing Climate."

She and many other experts believe coal can only be made environmentally sustainable through the more experimental technology of capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them underground.

A joint government-private project in the United States aims to build such a "zero emissions" plant by 2012. Separately, Xcel Energy Inc. of Minneapolis, a major electric and natural gas utility, is studying building a carbon capture and storage power plant in Colorado.

Across the Atlantic, the European Union may require carbon capture and storage systems for all new coal-fired power plants, with a proposal expected by year end. The gas would be buried in aquifers, depleted coal mines or geological faults deep underground.

But the costs are daunting.

"It takes a lot of money since you have to go so deep," said Brock of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "There is not one commercial carbon capture and storage project yet. It's yet to be proven."

With such high costs, few utilities will embrace these technologies without a strong push or subsidy from government. The U.S. Congress is weighing several proposals, but their fate remains uncertain.

The degree of public support for such policies remains unclear. Consumers may balk at having to pay more for electricity from "clean coal" plants, either through higher rates or taxes.

But there is growing awareness of the problem. In both the West and India and China, traditional utilities and new players are investing in wind and solar power. A subsidiary of coal giant Shenhua is building a 200-megawatt wind farm in the waters off China's east coast.

"The goal is to raise both efficiency and turn to renewables while backing out of coal in the process," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington. "The question is, can we move fast enough?"

Meanwhile, in Jungar Qi, the house-sized mine trucks rumble on, rushing their multi-ton loads of coal to railways and coal yards. The biggest landmark in the city — the two huge smokestacks of its coal-fired power plant.

The CIA has obtained new intelligence alleging that the head of Colombia's U.S.-backed army collaborated extensively with right-wing militias that Washington considers terrorist organizations, including a militia headed by one of the country's leading drug traffickers.

Washington's proposed farm policy overhaul threatens to worsen the plight of Africa's cotton farmers by providing fresh assistance to U.S. producers, African ministers said on Friday.

Speaking after a two-day World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting on cotton, representatives of cotton producers said they believed the 2007 farm bill -- an umbrella law that will set most U.S. agriculture policy for five years -- could boost aid to American cotton farmers by up to 66 percent.

On Wednesday, January 10, Managua's Plaza la Fe was the site of the kind of gathering Nicaragua has not seen since the 1980s, as more than 100,000 people converged to celebrate the inauguration of Daniel Ortega, the 61-year-old former Sandinista comandante and perennial presidential candidate who had returned to power after sixteen years in the political wilderness.

As the ceremony began, a recording of a fiery speech Ortega delivered during the height of Nicaragua's war against the contras blared from the PA system, stirring the crowd to life. Then Ortega emerged, flanked by the lions of the Latin American left, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales. The lines in Ortega's face have deepened since he guided Nicaragua through its war against contra insurgents, and his signature black mustache is dyed now, but the scene staged at the plaza was enough to evoke nostalgia for his revolutionary heyday.

This explains why government priorities are important better than most anything I've read recently. It also broke my heart.

IN 1995, I went to Chile's National Stadium to watch a soccer match. Soccer was something I neither enjoyed nor understood, but the game was hardly on my mind; instead, it was the arena.

. . .

All I could think of was: My God! This is National Stadium, where the bleachers were once filled with dissidents of every stripe after the coup, a mass waiting room for those about to be executed or tortured. This is where women were raped for the crime of wearing pants.

This is an excellent article on the use of words which carry emotional or value judgments.